Are You the One?

A sermon for Sunday, June 14, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God, our burden is heavy, but you have promised us a light yoke. Draw us together in this moment and draw us to you. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Church, I confess, I was not prepared for this. I was not prepared for this pandemic. I was not prepared for this moment in our nation’s history. On top of all of this, I was not prepared for preaching this summer.

This week, I erased the white board in my office, with all of the worship planning I had done for January to July. I erased the weekend off for my friend’s wedding, now postponed until the fall. I erased the next weekend, the half marathon in DC. I erased the dates for General Conference, which will now happen in 2021, and the dates for Annual Conference, which will be condensed into one day in the fall. I erased my plans for digging into Genesis texts over these next few weeks. The world is a different place than it was when I planned these months of worship, when June seemed so far away. I’m in a different place that I was in January. The slate needed to be cleaned.

But erasing that board left me with a blank slate and I’ve been thinking all week about how to fill it. I’m a lectionary preacher, as you know, which means that I tend to follow the church calendar and the schedule of texts known as the Revised Common Lectionary. I do this because the lectionary holds the wisdom of centuries and sometimes, when I don’t know what to say, the lectionary brings before me the right text for such a time as this. But as I looked over the lectionary texts for this summer and into the fall, this season we know as ordinary time, in these days that are anything but ordinary, I found myself struggling. While there were texts that appealed, they jumped between testaments and genres and timelines. I struggled to make order out of the chaos, and what little order I could make left my soul tired. I needed something else.

What I’ve figured out over this past week is that what I need is Jesus. That’s what rang through my spirit as I listened to Ahnnalise’s sermon last week. I need Jesus. I need to hear from the one who went to the cross to save me and the one who abides with us all still, the one who walked through the chaos of his day offering healing and hope, challenge and comfort. I need a good, long season sitting at Jesus’ feet and listening to all he has to say.

Because I have the same question that John the Baptizer had in the passage that Ahnnalise preached from. “Are you the one? Are you the one we’ve been waiting for? Or is there another?”

Or, let’s put it another way. Over and over again, we call Jesus our savior. Is he the one who can save us again now?

It’s genuinely a question. Can Jesus save us now? Does Jesus have anything to say for the world we live in now? Is he the Messiah, the Savior, we’ve all been waiting on, to get us through these hard times?

I’ve sat with the Baptizer’s question all week. It could be that there’s someone else that we should be listening and looking to right now, someone who builds off of what Jesus says and speaks to our current moment. It could be that we should turn to the prophets or to Paul or to the psalms. There are other voices to hear in our time. I’ve searched around and listened and done my best to find some place to point us toward.

And yet, I keep coming back to Jesus. Jesus, whose every sentence in the Sermon on the Mount challenges our hearts. Jesus, who speaks in parables that return new wisdom each time we read them. Jesus, who pours healing from his lips from the instant he begins preaching. Jesus, who can’t help but bring good news to the poor. Jesus, a savior born into a world longing for a Messiah, a world full of people crying out for salvation from oppression. Yes, I think Jesus is the one we’ve been waiting on.

See, many of us today miss the point of John’s question, because we don’t live in first-century Roman-occupied Palestine. But what I think we’ve seen over the past few months is that our world has more in common with Jesus’ than we thought before. Sickness is all around us, and we fear it. Many physicians have been working as hard as they can, but it is hard to find healing in the land.

And the people are restless, just as they were in Jesus’ day. In Jesus’ day, Rome ruled, but Rome was not just. Rome enforced the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome, by killing anyone who stood up to them and taxing everyone else deeper into poverty. Weapons and wealth ran the world in Jesus’ day, and the religious authorities knew it. While the poor and the sick languished under Roman rule, they had to pay another tax at the temple, to get right with God. And God have pity on anyone who tried to disrupt Rome or the Temple.

Because less than a hundred years before Jesus, a Roman general named Pompey laid siege to Jerusalem, desecrated the Temple, and installed Roman rule over Judea. No rebellions, no war. Just taxes and poverty, sickness and violence. And so you have a people longing, crying out for freedom, crying out for a messiah, crying out for a savior, someone who stop the tyranny and the deaths of the police state they were living under.

See, that’s why John the Baptizer was arrested. Because he challenged Herod, Rome’s puppet governor, and he challenged the religious elite. He started stirring things up. He made people believe that the world didn’t have to be the way it was. He gave people hope. And now, he’s turning to Jesus, to see if Jesus can make good on his promise of hope.

And Jesus says yes. Jesus says, “Look what I’m doing! See what is happening! John, if you can’t believe that I am the one, I don’t know what to tell you!

“But… I’m not exactly the one you think I am. I am here for those who are heavy burdened. I am here for those who are weighted down. I am here for those who don’t know where else to go. I love them, with all my being. Come to me, you who are weary, and I will give you rest.”

See, John, John didn’t promise rest. John didn’t speak with peace on his mind. John and Judas and all the disciples, they wanted some who could rise up against Rome. They wanted someone who could win. They wanted someone who could stand toe to toe with the powers of this world. But Jesus… Jesus is going to be someone different. Jesus has different ideas. Jesus doesn’t just want to upend the world we live in and free us from the sin in it, Jesus wants to bring about the reign of God, a new creation. All things made new. I think that if we walk with Jesus for these next few months, if we listen to what he has to say, I think we’ll be different too. Because I think now, more than ever, we need our savior.

In the middle of the pain we’re all living through, we need Jesus.

In the middle of all of the disunity and upending this world has to offer, we need Jesus.

In the middle of the hate and anger and vitriol that we have learned to swim in each and every day, we need Jesus.

Honestly? You can have everything else.

Just give me Jesus.

Just give me my savior.

Amen.